Earlier this year, an Indi-Gogo campaign caught my attention via my Deb Goes Green Twitter feed: a fellow from Albion, New York was planning a 26,000 mile cross-country trip in his 2013 base model Nissan LEAF to prove that "range anxiety" is a myth and that electric cars CAN cut it in doing the Great American Road Trip.

Not only that, he was planning on planting a tree in every one of the Lower 48 States in order to off-set whatever embedded carbon count had gone in to the making of the car in the first place...

Intrigued by his chutzpah, I contributed a small amount to the fund and that was that. I never thought I would actually get to meet him and hoped he would make it across the country.

Well- as you can see by the photos above, he not only made it from Albion, NY to Seattle, WA but he stayed at my house!

On Thursday, December 17th, I saw in a Tweet that Mr. Kent had already been through Seattle and was barreling down I-5 around Portland, OR. I tweeted him a lament that I had missed his pass- through. He said "No problem! You're only 172 miles away! I'll come back!"

So he did! On Friday, December 18, Mr. Kent arrived in his very -well-stickeredred LEAF and hung out with fellow Seattle Electric Vehicle Association member Brian Henderson and myself and regaled us with Stories from the Road!

Mr. Kent had NOT let anything stop him: snow, rain, running out of charge on his very first day on the road (due to being mis-routed by Google Maps), suspicious stares, disbelief, over-wary police departments, having to turn around to attend a family member funeral, getting stick in a ditch on a narrow, one-lane mountain road in Montana and being pulled out by a local and losing power 1 mile from the top of Pikes Peak in Colorado.

Along the way, he has met with many helpful people, gone to schools to talk about electric vehicle adoption, test-driven a TESLA (again, on a a curvy mountain road in Montana), obtained a KOA sponsorship, fixed broken public EV chargers on the road and been in countless interviews.

It was a privilege to sit up past midnight on 12/18 and listen to this man speak in his humble, humorous way. And I had fun taking down to Seattle's Pike's Place Market, showing off the Original Starbucks and Seattle's famous fish throwers!

As of this writing, Brian is somewhere on 1-5 headed south back to CA.Look for the red, stickered LEAF and buy the guy a cup of coffee. You won't be sorry you did!